Pen Pal

In stark contrast to his snarling savagery as he took me, Aidan is silent and gentle as he washes my body under the warm spray in the shower.

I’m shaky and shell-shocked, uncertain what I’d say even if I could speak, so I’m grateful he’s not asking me to. He turns me this way and that, soaping and rinsing my skin, then squirts a dollop of shampoo into his palm and washes my hair.

I stand with my eyes closed and wonder what happens next.

I’ve never had a one-night stand, so I don’t know what to expect. I don’t know the etiquette involved. Am I supposed to ask for his number? No, I already have that. Do I thank him? That seems weird, but then again, this whole encounter has been weird.

Amazing, but weird.

I can only imagine how awkward the goodbye will be, me standing at his door in bare feet and my wrinkled clothes that probably aren’t even dry yet, trying to act nonchalant and utterly failing. What do I even say?

“It’s been great, champ! Thanks for the fabulous sausage-stuffing!”

No. I might not be the world’s greatest conversationalist, but even I know that’s a nonstarter.

He murmurs, “Never met a woman who thinks louder than you do.”

“Sorry. I’m always up in my head.”

“You don’t have to apologize. Just making an observation. Tilt your head back.”

I obey him, closing my eyes and allowing him to rinse the shampoo from my hair. I lean against him with my arms wrapped around his waist and my breasts pressed against his chest and wonder again what Michael would think if he could see me now.

Which is when the guilt hits me, cold and solid as a brick dropped onto my head. A nasty little voice inside my mind starts hissing insults.

Your husband hasn’t been dead a full month yet, and you’ve already had sex with another man! How could you?

Aidan says softly, “Your body gets really tense when you start to freak out.”

I exhale and remain silent. There aren’t any words for what I’m feeling, anyway.

He reaches behind me to turn off the faucet. Then he palms my head and presses it to his chest. His other arm he wraps around me. We stand naked and dripping like that for a while, embracing in silence, until he says, “We can do anything or nothing. I don’t expect you to have any answers right now.”

How does he always know what I’m thinking?

Emotion threatens to swell my throat closed, but I speak around it. “What do you want to do?”

He gives me a squeeze and pronounces, “This, as much as possible.”

My laugh is soft. “That can be arranged.”

Stroking my wet hair, he presses a kiss to the top of my head. “You sure? I know your situation is complicated. I don’t want to make it worse.”

Without thinking, I say, “So far, you’re the only thing that’s made it better.”

I cringe when I hear how it sounds. How raw and vulnerable.

How needy.

But if Aidan thinks it’s off-putting, he doesn’t show it. He simply kisses my head again and murmurs, “Good.”

I raise my head and look at him. He gazes down at me with a faint smile, his eyes warm.

My voice wavering, I say, “Can I be honest with you?”

“That’s all I ever want you to be.”

“Okay. Well…” I inhale a breath, then let it go in a gust. “This has been amazing. I mean really amazing. Like, incredible. I don’t have any experience with this kind of thing because I was married for a long time and pretty much always in a long-term relationship before that.”

When I don’t continue, he says, “Are you asking me something in particular, or are you just thinking out loud?”

“I’m not sure. I’m having all kinds of feelings about this.”

“Me, too. You think this happens to me every day?”

I pull away and look him up and down, all that perfect rugged masculinity. “Yes.”

He pulls me back against him and cups my jaw in his hand. “No. It doesn’t.”

He stares at me with such unwavering intensity, I believe him. Nobody can lie that well this close.

I say, “Thank God,” and both of us are surprised by how forcefully it comes out.

Aidan starts to laugh. I blush from my neck to my forehead. He pulls me in and holds me tightly, nuzzling my ear. “Sweet bunny,” he whispers, still chuckling. “I think you like me.”

Flaming with embarrassment, I say, “Nah, I just need my roof fixed, and I thought I’d shag your brains out to see if I could get a discount.”

Pulling away, he pretends to be shocked. “I already gave you a discount!”

I grin up at him. “Oh, yeah. I forgot. Two thousand all in, right?”

He glowers, but he’s only playing. “Wrong. Ten thousand.”

“Wait, you said five!”

His glower cracks. He starts to laugh again.

I smack him lightly on the chest. “Jerk.”

“Guilty. What do you want for breakfast?”

“Don’t tell me you cook, too?”

“Only the best scrambled eggs you’ll ever eat.”

Smiling, I say, “I guess that’s what I’ll have, then.”

He lowers his head and softly kisses me. When he pulls back, his expression has turned serious. “I need to tell you something.”

My stomach plummets. “Shit. I knew it was too good to be true.”

“It’s not bad.”

“Then why are you making that face?”

“What face?”

“That scary serious face, like you’re about to tell me you have an STD.”

He opens the shower door, grabs a towel from the bar on the wall, drapes it around me, and starts drying my body. “Nope. Clean as a whistle.”

Enjoying the attention, I pause for a moment of sobriety. “Me, too, in case you were wondering. I suppose we should’ve talked about that before all the, um…”

“Fucking?”

“That would be the word, yes.”

He bends down to dry off my legs as I rest my hands on his shoulders. “That and your chances of getting pregnant with unprotected sex, too.” He straightens and gazes at me. “Also consent and safe words. I don’t normally get so carried away.”

“I’m on the pill…wait. Back up a sec. Safe words?”

“In case I get too rough with you.”

I almost laugh out loud. “There’s no such thing. I love how rough you are.”

He falls still. Gazing at me with unblinking intensity, he says slowly, “I could hurt you, Kayla. Accidentally, I mean. I don’t want that to happen.”

I like that he’s so concerned with my well-being. I also like that he’s taking the time to communicate that. What I don’t like is the sudden and unwelcome thought that maybe he’s hurt someone in the past.

Accidentally or not, it seems as if there might be a story there.

I ask tentatively, “Have you hurt someone before?”

“Yes,” he says instantly. Then he closes his eyes and swallows. “Not from sex, though. And it wasn’t an accident.”

I’m beginning to feel alarmed, but I keep my voice steady. “Then how?”

He opens his eyes. A muscle in his jaw jumps. He inhales a slow breath. “My father used to beat my mother. Badly. He was a raging alcoholic and very violent. He put her in the hospital more than once. It went on for years. I couldn’t do anything about it when I was small, but when I grew up…”

I realize I’m holding my breath. My heartbeat ticks up a few notches. I whisper, “What?”

He looks away. That muscle in his jaw jumps again. When he speaks, his voice comes very low. “I’m afraid if I tell you, I’ll never see you again.”

That rocks me back on my heels for several reasons.

One, because whatever he did, it was obviously bad. And by bad, I mean violent. And two, he’s willing to tell me, but he’s afraid of the consequences. He’s scared that I’ll freak out and run out the door.

Which means that three, he’s as into this unexpected situation between us as I am.

I don’t know if there’s a word for this emotion I’m feeling. Maybe because it’s a jumble of so many different things at once. But I do know for certain that whatever it is he did to his father, he did it to protect his mother.

Then I remember what he said to me in the bar.

“I didn’t like my father.”

Didn’t, past tense. Which suggests his father is no longer in the land of the living.

And right then, I discover something about myself I never knew before.

“Hey.”

He glances back at me, his gaze wary and his jaw clenched.

Staring straight into his eyes, I say, “The past is dead. So whatever happened, whatever you’ve done, just know that I’ll never ask you to explain yourself to me. I’ll also never judge you for something you did to keep someone else from getting hurt. No matter how bad that something was. Life is messy, and we all have our reasons for doing what we do. I don’t care about anything you did before we met.”

His lips part. He stares at me in disbelief and something else I can’t identify.

It could be hope.

“But from now on, I do care what you do. If we keep seeing each other, I expect total honesty. Got it?”

Looking stunned, he nods.

“Good. Now dry yourself off, Fight Club, because I’m starving.” I wind my arms around his shoulders, lift up onto my toes, and give him a soft kiss. Against his mouth, I whisper, “Your little bunny worked up an appetite from getting fucked so well by her big bad lion.”

He grabs me and hugs me so hard, I lose my breath. I feel his body tremble against mine, little shivers in his muscles that are in sync with his ragged breathing.

For some strange reason, at that moment, the verse Dante sent in his last letter crosses my mind.

But already my desire and my will

were being turned like a wheel, all at one speed,

by the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.

The words echo in my head before disappearing when Aidan kisses me.